López Obrador rejects a US report that warns of the impact on the environment of its electricity reform

President Mexican, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, rejected the findings of a report by the US Department of Energy USA that warns of an increase of up to 65% in the country’s emissions if the Government’s electricity reform is approved.

“With all due respect, they have no information about what is being done in Mexico,” said López Obrador at his morning press conference, held in Mérida, Yucatán state, in southeastern Mexico.

The president referred to the report that was leaked to the press by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the US Department of Energy on the constitutional reform to the energy sector that López Obrador sent to Congress on September 30.

The study predicted an increase from 26% to 65% in Mexico’s carbon emissions, an increase from 32% to 54% in electricity generation costs and from 8% to 35% in the probability of power outages if supported the constitutional proposal of López Obrador.

“It is false (the content of the report) and it does not sound logical, it sounds metallic,” declared the president.

López Obrador’s electricity reform causes controversy because it delivers a minimum of 54% of electricity generation to the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), a state-owned company, and makes autonomous energy regulators disappear.

It also nationalizes lithium and changes the criteria for electricity dispatch to always prioritize hydroelectric and fossil fuel plants of the CFE over private wind and solar plants.

Businessmen have warned of violations of the Treaty between Mexico, the United States and Canada (T-MEC), but López Obrador assured this Thursday that the concerns are from national companies. “No concern (in the US),” he responded to an express question.

The president revealed that he sent a letter to the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to establish the position of his government in the fight against the climate crisis “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help stop the problem of global warming.” .

Although he argued that he still cannot display its content because he does not know if Biden has already read it, he assured that the letter responds to the proposals indicated in the report of the Department of Energy.

“We are making commitments to have a clean energy production, as I do not know if you have already received the letter, I could not make it known now, it is not the most convenient,” he said.

The president reiterated that the State and the CFE will take advantage of hydroelectric plants, which he considers to produce “the cheapest and cleanest energy.”

This afternoon, the CFE issued a reply in which it accused the media that released the information of having made a note on a “so sensitive” subject based solely on a draft.

“It is important to clarify that the NREL carries out its studies based on the Program for the Development of the National Electric System (Prodesen). However, the data that they took into account are those that Prodesen published in 2018, not those of 2021. It seems suspicious and not very rigorous that they have taken figures from three years ago and the current ones have been disregarded, ”the Commission considered.

In addition, the CFE refuted some of the data, specifying the pages in which the emission projections are detailed and also considered that the note contains assumptions based on unverifiable arguments and “malicious” terms.

“We would like to recall that during 2021 the CFE generated 101,593 GWh of electrical energy, of which 36.81% are clean energy. 56% of the clean generation injected into the Mexican network per participant, during the same period, was generated by the CFE, including the generation of hydroelectric plants, ”they detailed.